Wiki » Brainstorming about how to get more active contributors

Synopsis: This page is meant to give an overview of all ideas that come up when brainstorming about how to increase the number of active contributors. The ideas are expected to be unfiltered, the filtering will be done later. So it is, for instance, perfectly fine to add ideas that are contrary to already added ideas. Adding the author of an idea is not needed, it is probably even better not to add the authors. Every idea may be added. When brainstorming, there are no wrong or stupid ideas. That said, ideas that don't comply with our code of conduct, will be removed. The intention is to sort the ideas by general topic (like whom to reach out to, or proposed changes to Mageia, or how to reach potential contributors) on this page, to make later reviewing them easier. Topics can be added when needed. You can also help brainstorming on IRC: #mageia-next

Whom to reach out to

IT students who get plenty of education about Windows, but not about Linux

They still exist, universities and schools that ignore Linux. Just about everything one former IT student knew about Linux when he graduated, was what he had learnt in Mageia. Thanks to what he had learnt here, he became a Linux developer and has now been working in the tech industry for a decade.

Young people without a future

Like asylum seekers who come from a "safe country" and can do nothing but wait till they get kicked out. Or like students who are not allowed to continue their study, because they don't fit well into the educational system.
Wouldn't some of them be perfectly capable of learning Linux and learning so much of it that they would then be able to find a job (and in case that matters: a job that can be done remotely, so that they can return to their home country), earn a living and have a future? Isn't there is a better place to start than with Mageia and in Mageia.

Statistics needed regarding younger newgen developers

to remain in the linux world, I guess many of them are developing on other linux forks, e.g. android os or android apps, but here we need more statistics.

How to reach potential contributors

What to tell potential contributors

Well, if we are brainstorming about how to increase contributors, I would say that there are several things that would help.

• Demonstrate that contributing has tangible benefit to the community.
• Share details of what, specifically, help is needed with.
• Provide a clear path for getting involved.

Who is a contributor

• well, developers, helpers in forum, users, anyone can be a contributor
• your time contributing or wanting giving time to contribute makes the difference
• for example: editing this wiki is a contribution, proposing ideas is be(com)ing a contributor
• a contributor is at least a user. So if we want more contributors, we need to start by having more users.

Previously used methods that may need to be revived or enhanced

• Mageia blog posts
• Forum posts
• Mailing list messages
• Presence at events
  • With a stand
  • With flyers at the stand
  • With a presentation (talk)
• Twitter (X)?
• Youtube
• Facebook
• TikTok ??

Proposed new methods

• Use a Mageia-sub-reddit, many youngsters and (potential) Linux-enthusiasts would be found there. One already exists https://www.reddit.com/r/Mageia/ but isn't much used, yet.
• Write an article and get it published in a magazine or on a website that many potential contributors read, about what contributing to Mageia can give you like:
  • experience in a project where people from many countries and cultures work.
  • experience in one or more of many different fields
  • being able to contribute incognito. There is no need to show your passport (except probably for the few who become a board member), but you can contribute with any available user name and any desired "real name" or even without a "real name".
  • being credited for your contributions, regardless of your background, regardless of the current political situation, regardless of your genotype and phenotype, regardless of your age, regardless of your health and wealth, regardless of your religion, country and culture.
• Create a flyer that is meant to attract new contributors. Then flyer near a tech university or at a FOSS event, try to get in touch with tech and IT students
• Similar for universities that offer translation studies, but then a dedicated flyer for future interpreters

How to revive sleeping contributors

Contact, one by one, everyone who has said they want to come back, but didn't do so

Except, of course, those who clearly can't because RL is too demanding.

Proposed changes to Mageia, to attract more contributors

Create a list of most needed contributions (including priorities)

I contribute to more than one Linux distro but reviewing the contribution link provides no information that would make me want to get involved. That is just a list of the things that all distros need to operate. It tells me nothing about where Mageia most needs help and what needs to be done.

If we are trying to figure out how to increase contributors, I would speculate that we have contribution shortfalls that are either causing things to not get done in a timely manner, we are too much burden on a small group of people or both.

We must know the areas in which we most need to help and what needs to be done. If a list of priorities hasn't been developed yet, I would recommend creating one.

We urgently need a DPO (Data Protection Officer)

We don't know for sure how account deletion requests should be handled, nor whether we should store less information about our users than we currently do, etc. discussion on sysadm-discuss ml

We need contributors to finally have good and official ARM support

More and more people are using (ARM) tablets instead of laptops, and ARM laptops exist, too. However, installing Mageia on such a device is often hard, never tested by QA team and not supported.

We have packagers who work on this, a very good job has already been done, e.g. 6639/6754 (98.3%) of packages have currently been built on armv7hl. However, we've been more or less stuck at this stage for a long time.

We need Perl (v5) gurus for some of our most important tools

Like for our traditional installer and MCC. They need better maintenance and new features.

About packaging

Change to a state of the art, easy to use, powerful and efficient build system

Like https://openbuildservice.org/.

Everybody (who has a Mageia account) would be able to branch a package, apply fixes, update, test the build and submit the branched package via service request for review. The last few maintainers of Mageia can accept the service request, recommend changes or reject the request. This would ease the workload of the last few maintainers because they only would need to review the service request instead of doing all the packaging work alone. In this way, also packages without fixed maintainers would get updates and some attention.

Becoming like another distribution is a no go for me. It's only because we have specificities that we can attract people. Being like OpenSuSE or like Fedora, means contributors would always prefer the original distro rather than the copy. We should instead focus on our specificities and promote them.

Make it easier to become a packager

This (the above) would also work around the absolutely inefficient, outdated, frustrating and longsome way of Becoming a Mageia packager.

Make it clear that joining the dev/packagers meetings is not obligatory

But that it would be nice if you manage to be there. In the forum someone reported that the idea of having to attend (every week and at a very inconvenient time), was enough to keep him from becoming a packager twice.

Have small, self-organized packager groups

An idea for getting more packagers could be to let them self-organize in small groups of 2-3 people maximum, based on close, but complementary skills, to cooperate on building some package. One member of the group could help the other and vice-versa.

Maintainership has growing costs

Besides personal life balance, developers or maintainers are actually not paid/rewarded so sometimes they could slowly fading or just slow down, as under certain circumstances the maintainership has growing costs (consider for instance following some upstream project having a release cycle of a month, if not weeks requiring continuous updates), as might become almost a halftime or fulltime unpaid job.

The update to the new infra hardware should be pretty close.

Once it will be made it should bring a breath of fresh air to the distribution and let it be more "efficient" also to the packaging process. With the newer cpu power/storage there should be enough room/power to test new stuff, new developing tools (that are already used elsewhere in other distro) and new ideas/scheme beside to the classic tools, at least for the size and the ambition of the distro.

Use a training mailing list for new packagers

A mailing list for this purpose was proposed a while back, I don't remember if it was implemented.

The Idea is that those training to be packagers can post their questions on the list, and experienced packagers will answer their questions & give guidance. Like using a mailing list instead of or complementing a mentor. Altough a mentor would still be required to become a qualified packager. Existing packagers could also post questions to the list, expecially useful to relatively new packagers.

Being separate from the dev list is an advantage, as the dev list is primarily focused on problems with specific packages, and not how to package.

A mailing list is better than online sites, as many using Mageia are not in European time zones, such a those in the Americas and Eastern Asia. This would give us a larger pool of potential packagers.

Make less use of librification

Current policies prefer moving libraries included in packages outside the upstream package.

Although that makes it easier to adress security concerns, it makes in harder to package an application, due to having to remove the internal library and link to the appropriate external version. In some cases we have to be vigilent to ensure that the version required by the library remains available.

So except in relatively simple cases, we could use the libraries included in the upstream package. Of course that depends on the judgement of experienced packagers, and I'm not there yet.

Switch to flatpak for packaging

I've been using Linux for about 20 years. There are some annoying things about it.

• Lots of graphical interfaces.
• Lots of boot systems.
• Lots of packaging systems.
• Incompatibility between packages of the same format. rpm packages from openSUSE don't work on Mageia and vice-versa.

There are a lot of people doing the same job. Distrowatch.com lists 275 distributions. For each of these distributions, someone needs to do the packaging for it.

One of the few things I can think of to improve the packaging problem is to adopt flatpak packages, only packaging what doesn't exist in this universal format.

A contributor works for free for a project if he has confidence in its future.

The foundations of mageia are sound. It's a community distribution with clear values. However, Our association governance doesn't work.

Improve our Association Governance:

*    => Membership of the association is based on merit and choice. However, this process is subjective and not based on clear rules.
*    => There aren't enough ordinary meetings or general assemblies to make decisions. Exchanges between the Council and the Board are almost non-existent. At the very least, the Board should validate the major orientations of distribution.
*     => What is our roadmap, what are our medium- and long-term objectives? If we don't know ourselves what we need to do and what we need to prioritize, how can we communicate calmly and attract new contributors?

Open up the Association to paying users

To increase the means of distribution, I would be in favor of opening up the association to its users and asking for a basic fee to finance these projects. I'm well aware that this would generate greater activity on the part of the treasurers, but it would force us to be more rigorous at the AGMs. These users could vote to elect a representative who would represent them on the board, but who would also be eligible for board positions (Treasurer, Secretary, etc.).

Allow an MLO representative on the Council

Could MLO, which is independent of Mageia but recognized by Mageia as a French-speaking forum, be represented on the Council? Is there always a leader present on the council to represent the mageia forums?

Revive our Local Communities Team

It already exists, even if hibernating, and can choose up to three council members as representatives for their team.

Localization used to be well supported from Mandrake on but needs more work now

It was the reason why I ended up using Mandrake 8.1 and staying with Mandrake and it successors. My localized keyboard was not supported in the first distribution that I tried, and impossible for me (and for a Unix guru who helped me) to get working in another distribution where it may have been supported, if you knew how to do it. However, it worked out of the box with Mandrake and ever since, just by selecting the correct keyboard while installing Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia. Now we seem to be doing less well. There are a lot less different keyboards in drakx-kbd-mouse-x11 than can be selected in e.g. the Plasma System Settings. Fixing https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042 while also adding all missing keyboards to drakx-kbd-mouse-x11 and communicating with local communities about https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15732 would make Mageia more attractive to potential contributors outside the countries where most of our current contributors live.

Make it easier to become a contributor

In line with a previous item, but more general, is this idea:
A contributor will work on a project if he finds the tools he knows and if they are efficient. I think it might be useful to take stock of the on-boarding process for new arrivals, and improve it. On the other hand, I'm not sure we take the time to step back and look at what's not working and improve it. I recognize that this requires teamwork.....

Make more decisions

We don't make enough decisions. At the moment, I think we still have IRC and matrix running in parallel. We should stop using IRC and invest more in Matrix, which makes sharing easier and is evolving to include video and sound.

Work on the servers

It is essential to improve speed and comfort for our developers. Perhaps we should reinforce the system team if it needs it, and call on new volunteers.

Use tools such as Jira

They might enable a simple kanban to know what to do and what to prioritize. Each team could have its own space to manage its actions.

I think Jira is a bad example as being closed source licensed. However, evaluating the best tools available to help us is a good idea. Now we need to prioritize: we cannot work on that before having stabilized the current set and have a sysadmin team able to manage them.

Invest in the sysadmin team

I don't know how our current solutions work, but investing in the system team to work on the architecture to automate/consolidate the build of packages, images and tests on recognized standards known to potential external contributors would be a plus.

Real Life and/or video meetings

We don't know enough about each other and we don't have enough opportunities to exchange ideas. How about getting together at least once in a while, face-to-face or remotely via video conferences, etc.? It's not easy to organize, but linux fairs are a good opportunity. It used to be done, but with covid we've lost those good habits. A small restaurant between contributors helps reinforce team spirit.

There are a lot of France based (or near France) so we could organize a Mageia week-end in a place able to welcome the number of people that would like to attend. It would be IMHO very useful to have, in addition to linux fairs, a *dedicated* meeting around just Mageia and all its aspects. Could help with knowledge transfer around sysadmin, packaging, communication, translation, ...and would help people know each other better, thus reinforcing the *existing* set of people that are commited. A timeslot could also be dedicated to install party, welcoming new comers, ...Having that event hosted by an IT university could help wrt space (they do have large rooms for that type of meetings) and also future contributors.

Evolve faster

In France, there is a very lively community that is developing around the promotion of video games under Linux. I think that some of these members are ready to help if we trust them and help them. Some of them are technically solid. They have an understanding of the graphic stacks under Linux and are attracted by the new features available (Wayland, Nvidia drivers, Mesa, Lutris, etc., kernel optimization settings). I am registered on their discord and can see how they manage to attract young people. Unfortunately, even if some use Mageia, many are on other distributions because Mageia does not evolve quickly enough. Some have proposed things to improve the look of the distribution, but they quickly stopped because they felt that we did not like breaking our habits and that ultimately we did not want to evolve.

Communication

We lack deeply in this area IMO to attract more contributors. We need to reinforce first our Atelier team to have more regular blog posts, create documents for new comers, beginners. We need an Ambassador program, where people recognized as such can present Mageia during trade shows, events, conferences WW, meetups. We need to prepare slide sets, advertising cards and the like to use, share and distribute during shows, events, meetups. We should cover our specificities (the drak* tools/MCC, URPM, msec, auto_inst, desktops integration, server services We should ask existing users to recruit at least 1 new user during the year. Meaning we could double our community, and thus generating more possibilities to have more contributors. The association should support these programs, including financially, meaning we need to have a campaign to get more funds for that. The renewal of HW would also benefit from that.

To be merged, reply to the association discussion

I remove all history, because I don't have the time to read everything, sorry. I just want to add my point of view:

We left the field. We are not organized (meetings, elections) except great QA team which is rigorous. I'm impressed. We are not publishing our presences in all event (many thanks to DTux who subscribed us everywhere in France for years). We were rejected from FOSDEM once or twice, but we did not retry. From the french forum, I only know 2 peoples (thank you Guygoye and Spank) who regularly participate on local install-party regularly.

Don't question too much, at work, with many IT developers, no one know Mageia. We are not on their radars; people don't know us.

What I would do: - split atelier in two. Atelier keep producing artwork, and respond to any design query. Having a dedicated Communication team, that subscribe M.Org to events, ask Atelier to produce XYZ goody and with their dedicated budget, buy and spread goodies. If I know someone from my city willing to spend one evening a week, I will ask a local to do an install party.

Good night everyone, work is calling me,

Also to be merged, possible extra replies in the forums

Forums thread: Brainstorming about how to get more active contributors

Everything from before October 7 has been merged. Leaving this link here for easier checking.

New comment from Oct 28th:

Maybe you should really care about the ones that are really interested in contributing to Mageia. I literally got tired of trying to find a new mentor, few years ago Zezinho(who passed away) was mentoring me, and then I wrote in the list since I wanted to continue my path in becoming a packager. Got no response from users. So I guess delegate the labour of recruiting people to this project might be a good start.

To be merged, private mail

We should provide secure boot. Mageia lost users to other distro's because we don't offer it. In the USA, all corporations that process credit card data or personal date must have a secure workstation to protect sensitive data. This is why any hardware designated for business type use will not have the option to disable secure boot.